Chapter Five

 

Paul Leeds sat quietly in his kitchen, reading the newspaper and watching the snow blanket the budding blue morning that remained dark and unenlightened by a hidden December sun. The snow had continued to fall overnight, accumulating another three inches across the low-lying valleys, and another three were expected by noon. He enjoyed these quiet morning interludes, especially in the winter; he found them to be relaxing. But the peaceful hush and tranquil bliss of this morning’s reverie was blatantly interrupted when he became distracted by a headline...

 

‘Local Teen Dies from Fatal Fall’

 

It wasn’t so much the headline that gripped him; it was the two words in the article’s sidebar that jumped out from the page—Cedar Manor. His heart began to pound, and his eyes felt paralyzed, frozen to the words on the page. He just kept staring at those two words over and over, examining them, making sure he was really reading them.

He moved his eyes to the picture, and there it was, lurking and silent with its mystery and captured in the image that dwarfed the top half of the front page. How can this be? No one’s been there in years.

His thoughts and memories, which were numbered in multitudes, assembled in chaotic disorder and ran rampant though his mind. The dancing parade of memories fueled an inner nervous frenzy, causing his forehead to sweat and his respiration to falter. His breathing came in gasps as he began reading the article. He would look for his inhaler when he was finished.

He read how a trio of teens had tried to enter Cedar Manor, and how one of them, a young man, had fallen to his death trying to climb to the top of the entranceway. Police suspected an accident since a ‘small amount’ of alcohol was discovered in the boy’s possession. Paul battled to believe that as the truth, but deep inside, he knew otherwise.

Did Leah know about this? His daughter had sounded distant lately, not as conversational as usual, as though she were hiding something. Whenever he asked her, she said it was nothing, that she was fine, and not to worry.

Susan was now the Director of the Paranormal Research and Investigative Society; surely she’d seen Leah. Paul’s next thought was to call Susan and ask about his daughter, and as the thought churned inside his head, the phone rang. At this time in the morning, a ringing phone was a rare occurrence.

He felt the hands of irony and fate working together as he stared at the caller ID. The caller was Susan Logan, as though summoned by some dormant telepathy. He began to calm himself and his breathing as he picked up the phone.

“Susan?” His straight-to-the-point response was quicker than “Hello.”

“Paul?” she asked.

“It is,” he said. “Susan, where’s my daughter?”

“She’s home, Paul. She’s fine; I spoke with her about an hour ago.”

“Has she seen the headline, this morning?”

“She already knows, Paul.”

Susan told him everything, starting with the visions and dreams that Leah had been having for months, followed by the desperate phone call she’d received in the middle of the night when Leah had dreamed exactly what had been taking place at Cedar Manor.

“She saw everything, Paul,” she said. “Even while she sleeps, her third eye is awake. She saw it as it happened.” Susan explained the story of Snake, Hollywood, and Jimmy Nort.

“So, my daughter’s memories of that place have been tormenting her, and you didn’t call me? Why didn’t you tell me any of this?” The tone of his voice revealed feelings of being shut-out, excluded, even being tiptoed around, as though he were some fragile glass that would shatter at the slightest tension.

“I’m sorry, Paul,” she said. “I’m bound by doctor-patient confidentiality, just as I was to you. However, I’ve been encouraging her to tell you, and she won’t, so I thought it was time.”

“So, you’re breaking that confidentiality, now?”

“I feel I must, Paul,” she said. He waited for her to speak, as there was a lingering silence between them. “When we interviewed the two remaining teenagers, they were adamant that some sinister black shape appeared atop the canopy and was responsible for their friend’s fall.”

The silence that first lingered now stretched into infinity. Finally, she related the details of the apparition the teens had described. When she’d finished, she paused before continuing.

“Paul, she’s decided that she’s going back into that house.”

The silence on his end remained unbroken.

“Paul, are you still there?”

He slowly slouched back into the kitchen chair, holding the phone in his hand. He spoke the only words that entered his mind.

“Like hell she is,” he said.

“I’m afraid there’s not much you can do to stop her,” she said. “The past couple of months have been horrendous for her, and the visions and dreams are getting worse. They’re becoming longer, stranger, and more frightening. It’s reached the point where she can’t concentrate or focus on anything else. Paul, confronting that house may be exactly what Leah needs to put this horrible history behind her, once and for all.”

“That house will destroy her, the same way it did me!”

“Paul, you had a chance to confront that house and chose otherwise. I’ve always felt that you made the wrong decision. Leah was just a child, which means her memories are not as vivid as yours. She can, and she will, overcome that house. I know her!”

“Do have any idea what kind of evil dwells behind the doors of that house?” His voice became mocking, exposing her lack of forethought or knowledge. “That house is the sanctuary of evil. Did you believe anything that I told you during our sessions? One thing’s for sure; she’s not going into that house without me!”

“I was hoping you’d say that,” she said, quickly injecting her defense and sounding unexpectedly relieved. “I think you both need to do this together, and Paul, we’re all going to be there together—the entire team. We are not going to let anything happen to her.”

They discussed the tentative plans the team had regarding Cedar Manor, and then Susan mentioned something of which he’d almost long forgotten.

“Paul, do you remember Tahoe Manoa?”

The name awakened an old memory of the Arizona desert, and he said nothing as that moment replayed in his mind. Susan continued speaking.

“We’re searching for him, right now. Leah has always felt that he would be instrumental in helping her, but she’s searched and could never find him.”

“He may not even be alive anymore.” Paul expressed his skepticism, searching for any reason to call off the impending escapade.

“He’s not dead, Paul; he’s only in his late-seventies.” Paul said nothing, so Susan continued. “Paul, Leah seems to think that you brought her to him for a specific reason. You know that; she wrote it in her memoir. She thinks that something prompted you to take her to him. Is she right?”

Paul thought back to his bubbly, blonde-haired little girl with sky-blue eyes and the face of an angel; how she’d laughed and giggled and pointed and mentioned people that weren’t there. At first he’d thought it was only the imaginations of a child, but then one day, months before moving to Cedar Manor, his little girl had said something both perturbing and haunting.

“One day she walked up to me and asked me why Grandpa slept in a box. I had no idea what she was talking about. It was a strange thing for her to say, and kids say strange things all the time, but it kept nagging and gnawing at me. It was two days later that I found my father at home, dead of a heart attack.

“It was at his funeral viewing, when I realized the casket was what she’d meant—the box. I knew she’d seen it. My wife continued to ignore it all, content with the child imagination theory, but I wasn’t. Yet, there were other instances as well.

“So, I searched out someone who could tell me. I’d learned of Tahoe Manoa from a mutual friend who’d mentioned him, and then I sought him out. I arranged a trip to Arizona because Janet’s parents lived there, and I took Leah into the desert to meet him, just like she tells it in her memoir. That’s when he told me that my little girl had a very powerful third eye. I knew what he meant, but had never heard the phrase before.

“Our meeting was cut short, and he told me to visit him again, as I’m sure you know from reading the book, but what you didn’t read was that I went back, without her. He told me that Leah’s third eye saw what human eyes could not. She saw the dead, images of the past, and possibly the future, with an unlimited focus. Tahoe said that such a third eye as my daughter possessed was comparable to his own, something he’d never encountered before.”

“Tahoe is one of the most gifted psychics on the face of the earth,” Susan said, explaining her previous study of him.

“I know,” Paul said. “And that means so is my daughter. That house fed off of her ability, and it’s continuing to do so. I will not let that happen again!”

“That’s why you need to be there, Paul. She’ll be angry that you’re there and equally at me for telling you anything, but I feel it’s absolutely necessary. All of us need to surround her. The greater we are in number, the better the outcome of what we’re about to undertake.”

“I hope to God you’re right,” he said, and hung up the phone.

He resumed his practice of staring out at the falling snow, listening to the soft pit-pat sound it made even through closed windows. His eyes gazed through the wintry scene and into the past, where dark memories replayed on a picture screen in his mind. He recalled standing outside of Cedar Manor for the first time. Its dark, colonial structure, somewhat gothic to his perception, had pricked a bad vibe inside of him. Something about its darkness and strange structure with its canopied entranceway, the side by side gable windows, the odd, pointed spire somehow challenging Heaven, had caused him to quiver inside.

Though he would never tell Janet of his apprehension; her excitement was near ecstasy at the site she’d purchased at a heavily reduced cost. She was a realtor, and after having acquired the house, it not only became her home, but her project. She would restore this house back to its ‘former glory,’ as she put it. The home was built during the Revolutionary War, and what dwelled inside was history, according to Janet. She would soon find out that it was so much more.

He recalled standing on the walkway while she enraptured herself in front of the house with her arms open wide, embracing and adoring its sleeping magnificence. He had clutched Leah’s hand and noticed that her tiny grip squeezed his a bit harder. He’d turned to his little girl and noticed her big blue eyes grew wider as she stared at the house. She didn’t seem to fear it, but the look on her face seemed cautious, knowing, but blindly unaware.

On the second day that they’d been there, the cleaning and moving crews had left for the day, dusk had befallen Cedar Manor, and quiet descended upon the house as the small family lounged in the drawing room, watching TV. Paul remembered it vividly as though only seconds had passed through a space of two decades: the changing color of light from the TV that flashed through the room like a dimly lit disco ball, illuminating shadows and silhouettes upon the walls around them, the clanking sound the furnace sometimes made in this dark and unfamiliar palace, the smell of cleaning chemicals intertwined with freshly applied paint, all of them were memories that hadn’t died to his senses.

That night as he had carried Leah to bed, up to the floor that housed their bedrooms, they’d passed the rocking chair that had sat for so long, undisturbed and untouched by human hands. It was now a relic, an antique showpiece that remained part of the house’s history. He’d pretended not to see it moving, after all, the movement was only slight; there could’ve been a draft from somewhere. He had ignored what he’d seen from the corner of his eye and moved quickly, so his nearly sleeping daughter could get to bed.

But as they’d walked past the rocker, her tiny finger had poked out into the air, and the peppy tone of her voice was uncharacteristic of the dozing, sleepy child he’d hoped to be carrying.

“Daddy? Who’s the lady in the rocking chair?”

Paul had closed his eyes, feeling a jolt like lightning surge through his body. A momentary lapse of reason made him have to rouse the adult he was back into being.

“No one, sweetheart,” he’d said, “Close your eyes and go to sleep.”

She’d closed her eyes again and her hand dropped down, pointing to the floor as he had carried her. He’d tucked her in tightly and cast his eyes around the room in all directions, noticing nothing out of the ordinary. He had looked down at his now sleeping angel. He knew she’d seen someone, but he would keep quiet since Janet became irritated whenever Leah ‘saw’ things.

His little girl saw inexplicable things and ghostly beings from that second night in the house, and as time progressed, he became consistently aware of the instances. One day, in the vast dining room, the priceless, three-tiered, glass teardrop chandelier swayed slightly back and forth with no provocation. This time, there couldn’t have been a draft. Leah sat at the table, pointing her finger up and staring at it, transfixed by something other than its movement.

Janet hadn’t noticed any of it; she never did. Once again, she sat at the table, dominating the conversation, all of which was about her, about her plans for the house, how they had to explore the basement, how she would hold an open house when everything was finished. Paul caught only bits and pieces of her banter as he continued to watch his daughter closely. Leah kept ogling the chandelier, staring at some part of it he failed to see, and then her small mouth gaped open in awe at whatever it was that swayed the chandelier in a horizontal motion.

He nearly leapt across the table at her, shaking her from the spellbinding trance of the unseen attraction.

“Leah, sweetie, wake up,” he said, clutching his hands at her shoulders and shaking her lightly. He looked up and noticed that the chandelier had stopped swaying as he grabbed her. By some unnatural distortion of the law of physics, it was still, as though the previous moment in time had been erased. Leah’s eyes diverted and refocused on him, and then she glanced back up at the chandelier one last time and back to him again, as though whatever captivated her attention had never been there.

Janet stopped in mid-sentence and looked at the two of them, issuing a schoolgirl’s scoff that she wasn’t being heard. She’d been oblivious as to what was occurring and began yammering about another subject. It was better that he remained vague about Leah’s visions. What Janet didn’t want to know wouldn’t hurt her; at least, that’s what he’d thought.

Later, he’d seen Leah playing with the rocking chair. It had continued to move on its own, and he knew that she was seeing someone in the chair because she never made any attempt to sit in it, as if it was already occupied. And then, she came up with a name...

Agnes. Leah could never have known that the house was owned in the 1930’s by Casper Marlowe and that his wife’s name was Agnes. Janet had continued to deem Leah’s visions as imagination. She’d never connected Mrs. Marlowe’s first name to what, or whom, Leah saw. But Paul was also discovering that there was something far more disturbing about Cedar Manor than Leah seeing an old woman in a rocking chair, and he was going to have to feed Janet the whole truth, piece by piece.

Still, she refused to listen, dismissing everything as nonsense and a child’s overactive imagination, but things began to occur that even she couldn’t deny. The glass in the house began to break of its own volition: candle fixtures, lamps, windows, even dishes and priceless china. The glass would shatter for no apparent reason, untouched by human hand or presence.

Silently, Janet began to take notice, and he recognized the underlying expression of fear on her face. It seemed to combine with the uncharacteristic quiet that soon pervaded her. They began to hear voices, even screaming that woke them in the night.

Then one night, on one of the rare occasions when he actually fell asleep, he was awakened by a series of inflicted pains. He screamed himself awake, fighting some unseen force as he scrambled to flee the bed and turn on the light. As the light filled the room, he saw blood and looked in the mirror. There were scratches to his face, his chest, and even his back. The blood soaked through his tee-shirt.

“Do you see what I’m telling you?” He yelled at Janet as she sat up in bed. “There’s something wrong in this house! We have to leave here!”

Janet just sat up in bed staring at him with a glassy look in her eyes. She was unmoved and turned her head slightly away, as though mesmerized by some unseen enchanter. She maintained a subtlety that hadn’t existed in her before, an uncommon quiet that now grew even louder. She helped him attend to the scratches without saying more than a few words.

Then the occurrences seemed to die down for a brief interlude. Two weeks passed without a single incident, and Paul tarried at the notion of packing their belongings and fleeing. Stupidly, he’d decided to wait.

Soon, it was time for their excursion to the basement. After the uneventful silence, he saw no reason why he couldn’t bring Leah with him. She’d wanted to go so badly, and he remained uneasy about leaving her upstairs without him. Janet refused to see, to understand, and though she was still doting on the open house idea, she did so with that same quiet that had come about her lately and an unexpected casualness. His daughter would come with him, where he could see her. Janet would stay behind and wait to hear his report of the excursion.

The walls of the basement were erected with sturdy hunks of limestone that piled high into a catacomb structure. The smell was dank, musty, and dusty from years of inactivity. The basement stored decades, even centuries of antiques, artifacts, and furniture, much of which dated back centuries through to the 1920’s.

He became uneasy as Leah darted off into the various rooms, squealing with excitement most common in a child. He’d never been down here before, and the thought of having to search for her beneath the construction of this huge mansion made him nervous. He agreed to play Hide and Seek with her. He would close his eyes, count to ten, and watch which direction she’d taken off in. And of course, knowing where she was, he would find her.

During a round of the game, he was about to enter the room where she’d hidden, when her screams echoed throughout the basement, bouncing from its limestone walls. He was inside the room in an instant, and in that instant, he’d snatched her up into his arms.

“Leah, what’s wrong? What is it, honey?” She quivered in his arms, and her hot tears wetted his neck as he held her. She was pointing to the corner of the room. He saw nothing. He knew she’d seen a ghost or something equally horrific, but he wouldn’t learn the extent of what Leah had seen until years later when she wrote her memoir. She’d seen a vision of a dead body in the corner of the room.

When the excursion into the basement was over, he fought with Janet and threatened to take his daughter away from that house that night. Yet even the fight was not one of their usual ones. She was distant, removed, preoccupied with something he couldn’t identify. She’d refused to leave her house, even after one of the workmen fell from the staircase and broke his neck, claiming that he was pushed, even though no one had been there.

Later that night, Leah’s screams rang out from her bedroom through the entire floor. Startled from his sleep, he ran into her bedroom, where she was sitting up in bed with her arms stretched out to him. She would later write of seeing two men killing a woman in her room, their nudity, and the perversion of the act itself. He’d grabbed his daughter, and without taking anything else, whisked her out of the house and into the night, despite Janet’s weakened protests and her growing confusion.

He’d taken Leah to his mother’s house, and in the morning light, the guilt over leaving Janet behind nagged at him in its attempts to inflate the larger sense of guilt he’d felt over the entire issue.

He’d never mentioned a word to her about Tahoe Manoa; that he’d diagnosed their daughter, well his daughter, as a powerful seer. He couldn’t begin to imagine the response if he and Leah were to somehow ruin her plans. When Leah was six months old, her biological mother died from a blood disorder; he’d married Janet within a year. They would go on living as if Janet were Leah’s mother and then tell her the truth when the time came at a later age.

As soon as the sun rose, he drove back to Cedar Manor to retrieve Janet. Something in that house had possessed her; he was certain of that now. He drove like a madman on the way to Cedar Drive, the speedometer ascending from sixty, to seventy, to seventy five. He ran several stop signs until abruptly pulling in front of the house he’d fled only six hours before.

He didn’t stop and bother to be intimidated by its dark, foreboding presence; there wasn’t time. He ran into the house and called out her name over and over again...until he reached the balcony. His mind would not accept what his eyes were seeing. It couldn’t be real; it couldn’t have happened.

The first thing he saw was her feet swaying back and forth beneath her dress. There she was, hanging from a noose tied to the balcony, her eyes closed, her face fixed in sudden slumber. He’d screamed out her name and heard it echo through the house. She didn’t flinch, she didn’t move. He ran over to her and tried to grab her by the feet, but the noose was tied to the top of the balcony, and from where he stood, she swayed tantalizingly out of reach.

He ran to the top of the stairs and tried to pull her up using the short length of rope and the noose—impossible. There was not enough rope and the weight was overwhelming. He did manage to touch the side of her face, and it was cold. She was dead. He saw it; he felt it. His screams rang out as he fumbled with the rope, realizing that he was too late. He had to get to the bottom of the stairs and call 911.

Something stopped him midway down the stairs. He couldn’t comprehend what he was seeing at first. It seemed to appear in rippling waves that distorted and disfigured the normal surroundings, as though its presence was trying to merge with reality, but with limited success. Suddenly, he’d heard harsh, heavy breathing that was not his own. It surrounded him, yet no one was there.

He watched the wave-like distortion as it appeared to be forming an image, a sight he could not fathom. It had a rotted mane of long hair and several eyes that stared back at him. Its features were deformed, devilishly misconstrued and representing Hell’s definition of beauty. The sight changed into that of a beautiful, young, blonde woman with angelic features. He wouldn’t recognize the young woman for many years to come.

And another image formed from that one. Wide, black, obsidian eyes stared back at him from a pale green face that bore the countenance of death itself, death that continued to live through ungodly sanction. Its mouth opened, baring serpent style fangs. Its head, misshapen and laden with growths and pointed horns, drew back, revealing its deformity.

The unholy sight he beheld had driven him to the madness that seemed, to this day, still a touch away. Panic and fear had attacked him and stolen his breath in the process. The reality of everything around him had seemed glossy, dreamlike, momentarily causing him to question its existence. He remembered crawling on his hands and knees down the staircase, and that was all he could recall. They’d found him in the entranceway of the house, delirious, screaming, laughing, and pointing inside.

He’d spent the next two years in Green Valley Mental Institution under the care of Dr. Susan Logan. Susan, at the time, had been working on her degree in Parapsychology. She believed, but could only believe from the standpoint of the fact that she trusted him, not from any personal experience. But she saved his sanity, and he would be eternally grateful to her for that.

He’d told her most of everything he could remember about the happenings inside that house. One of the many things he’d described was finding Janet swaying from the balcony, but he never mentioned the vision he beheld on the staircase, or the vision of the beautiful girl he would later be able to identify as his daughter, Leah.

He’d never told Leah that Janet was not her mother, but her stepmother. For years he’d intended to, but after Janet’s death, what was the point? Now, Leah had decided to go back into that house, and history would be rising to the surface. Would it stop her from going if he described the vision he saw that night to her? He doubted it.

Leah appeared to be soft, innocent, but in truth she was fearless, headstrong, and persistent. She was wise beyond her years, forced into that role by the experience of Cedar Manor. She would listen, but she would face down that house one way or another.

The thought of the impending confrontation made him rise from the chair to grab his inhaler; he needed it now. He stuck it in his mouth and pumped two puffs of mist into his lungs.

Whatever demons dwelled in that house had claimed Janet’s life and almost his own. They’d fed from his daughter’s ability in the beginning, and from some unjustified realm, sought to do so again. But there was one thing that Paul Leeds was resolutely sure of as he allowed the mist to open his bronchial tubes and the new air to clear his mind—he would die before that house ever laid claim to his daughter.